


That's Bait

by Winterling42



Series: Wasteland Avengers [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Mad Max Series (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Dimension Travel, Gen, unfinished plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-03
Updated: 2016-03-03
Packaged: 2018-05-24 13:23:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6155071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The decision to work together isn't set in stone, but Furiosa has a plan to get them all home alive. The fact that the plan is utterly insane doesn't really concern anyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That's Bait

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently there will be more of this. Author reserves the right to skip all the action-y bits if that's what ends up happening. Who knows? Not me.

Fifteen days. They have to survive fifteen days, in hostile territory, with a load of cloth scrap and two… the word they’d used was ‘super soldier.’ Furiosa knows survival better than the gears of her own hand, which Bucky had returned to her without comment when she’d reached out for it. She knows that she and Max can survive on half rations for fifteen days. That they’ve both been hungrier, longer. But they only have enough water for two, and it doesn’t matter how hungry you get in the Wasteland. It’s the water that will kill you.

She knows that Max looked to her because she was always the one who knew how to lead. He’s the loner, the last spring in an engine that ran him into the ground. And then deeper. She’s the one with a crew, who knows what it means to have other people relying on you, and relying on them.

Well. The first part is true, anyway.

Furiosa sits in the dark and keeps watch, and it doesn’t take her very long at all to gather all the pieces of the only plan they have. At midnight she stirs out of her curled post, wraps cold fingers around the cold metal of her arm and stands to stretch. Bucky takes a deep breath, lets it out with all the patience of a hunter, and Furiosa finds that she can turn her back on him, can kneel at Max’s side and nudge the back of his shoulder with her stump (so that her hand can rest easy on the pistol at her hip).

***

Max woke her at dawn. Furiosa sat up and looked around before rubbing sand from her eyes, gritting her teeth. “Let’s get them food,” she murmured, just for his ears. “For the morning, anyway. Half portions.”

“Won’t make it back on that,” Max said, and he meant it to be gentle but he was the one who’d asked her to do this. So Furiosa glared at him, and the road warrior rocked back on his heels, looked away, shamed. He went to dig the rations out of the buggy, along with a flask of water still carved with the flaming skull no one had been able to scratch off.

Furiosa waited until the two strangers were awake and eating before she spoke. The mealworm cake was too heavy on her tongue, and there were things she had to do before she ate. “If this was a few hundred days ago,” she told them first, the super soldiers, “I wouldn’t have asked before I shot you. We don’t have the food or the water to make it back to the Citadel with four people.”

“Shouldn’t’ve helped us to begin with, if that was what you wanted,” Bucky said, and there was just enough strangeness in his voice that Furiosa couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not. She and Max had been attacked by the same Tatter-band that had gone after Steve and Bucky. It wasn’t _help_ if the band was trying to kill both of you.

“We don’t do that sort of thing anymore,” she continued, glancing at Max. He nodded, his tiny smile as fragile as a leaf uncurling in the sun. “There is another way. It’s not easy, but it’s the only way to keep all of us alive.”

‘Not easy’ was an understatement. Until she’d killed a god, Furiosa would have said this was the craziest plan she’d ever come up with. But Joe was dead, and helping strangers was something that you did if you were human. If you could afford what it would cost.

“So what is it?” Steve pressed, and there was a lack of concern in his expression that Furiosa could have taken for ignorance. And maybe it was, a little. The majority of his indifference, she thought wryly, came from a person that _liked_ crazy plans.

“We don’t have the resources we need, so there’s only one way to get them,” she said, and Max sucked in a quick breath. Grunted thoughtfully, like he was measuring their chances and finding them good. “We take them from someone else.”

“Draw down a raid,” Max agreed, nodding sharply when the other two still looked confused. “Set out bait.”

“We’re already bait,” Furiosa said, leaning forward to set out bullets as landmarks in the sand. “The lamp’s the Citadel. We’re here, fifteen days out. On half rations, we have seven days to track down a raiding party. We’re one buggy, running slow and heavy. Any clan we pass through is going to want a piece of us.”

“How did you think you were going to make it before?” Steve asked, watching where Furiosa laid out border lines by running her fingertips through the sand.

“By not running slow,” Max said drily, and Bucky laughed. It was a sharp, short bark of a laugh, but it was unusual in the Wasteland, infectious. Furiosa smiled back at him, a baring of her teeth like friendship. How strange, to feel like their liveliness was rubbing off on her.

“If we don’t hit a raid in four days, we’ll think of something else,” she said. She didn’t mention that they still had enough bullets for two. From the sharp look Steve gave her, she didn’t have to. Furiosa looked back at him. If it was a choice between these strangers and Max, there was no choice. They were outsiders, no matter how useful and strong.

Despite all that, he smiled at her. This one was a crooked smile; it changed the lines of his face into something less trustworthy and far more interesting than the somber soldier he had been before. “Then I guess we’d better get going,” he said, pushing himself to his feet.

No one, even Max, disputed that she’d be driving.


End file.
